Gregg,
Although I'm by no way expert in hinting, but i think the way you
describe the hinting process is a bit misleading. The reason is I
think a hint program will almost always tied to a font, maintly
because the hint program will always refer to a control points, which
will differs form one outline to another. Thus, it does not make much
sense to seperate the hint program from the outline.

True technically. I make the rash assumption that hint programs for
similar letterforms will have certain common patterns. The idea being
not that one could use the same set of hint programs for multiple fonts,
but that one could take bits and pieces and strategies from one set of
hints and modify them as needed to instruct another font. So for that
one might have separate licensing. (Consider the view that a TT
Instruction stream - bytecodes - is to a high-level TT hinting language
as machine code or Java bytecode is to a high-level programming
language. So one could release "sourcecode" to various hinting programs
with some kind of LGPL so they could even be used in proprietary fonts.
Maybe that's completely impractical, but it's kinda fun to think
about; I won't know until I do some experimenting and research.)

Anyway, features that you describe for a hinting program, I think the
program that fit's is Microsoft Visual Truetype.

Luckily, I don't have a windows machine. ;) I've looked into VOLT and
VTT, but something deep deep inside of me gets very queasy at the
thought of using MS software if I'm not getting paid to do so. /)
Anyway I'm still learning Fontlab and just discovered its TT instruction
capabilities. Its previewer is quite nice. I don't know if I like
their high-level instruction language, though.

Another program that might suite your need is mensis. It is being
develop by Geroge Williams, the same person who develop fontforge.
Mensis is strictly for editing truetype instruction, and it does

I'll take a look. There's also TTIComp. And I got this crazy idea of
writing an emacs major mode for editing and compiling TT "assembler".
It wouldn't be very hard to write a TT instruction compiler to make the
bytecode stream; inserting the instruction stream into a font would be a
little harder, but not exactly rocket science. Hey, if they can do it
in Python, why not Elisp?